13 ms·

Adobe Goes After 27-Year Old ‘Pirated’ Copy of Acrobat Reader 1.0 for MS-DOS

bscphil 6y ago
> Looking more closely at the takedown notice, we see that it was sent by the “brand protection analyst” at Incopro, which is one of Adobe’s anti-piracy partners There's a whole secondary and very interesting story to be told here about the nasty relationship that has formed between copyright holders and these firms specializing in takedowns that cling to them like barnacles on a whale. It's obviously tempting to outsource a job like tracking down copyright violations which doesn't play in to any of your business's competencies, but it also seems quite likely that the companies who provide this "service" typically do so in a way that looks good on a paper report that a manager at the host company receives, but doesn't actually benefit them optimally for the money they spend on it. Takedown companies seem to go after violations that will net them the fastest and most reliable takedown rates. They want to run up the score so that they can say "last month, we took down 5482 violations of your copyright in Adobe Reader" or what have you. This means, largely, going after posts and uploads on sites that have "quick service" DMCA takedowns like Twitter and YouTube. You're not investing time on random websites that may or may not even respond. No human intelligence is required (indeed, even desirable) in this process. It's effectively humans being paid the lowest possible wage to do an automated job. In some cases I suppose it's probably fully automated.
- optimiz3 6y ago
  Diffusion of responsibility; the takedown firm takes a lot of the bad PR and legal liability when wrong. Adobe also shields their brand by not insourcing.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    The wording of this headline disagrees. And Adobe can try to shift the blame however they want, the final responsibility lies with them as the rights owner and as the ones who hired that takedown firm to act in their name.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  I think you're right - just looks like monthly report padding. This is the problem with private security, it's hard to trust that the client sees the value in you, when part of your effectiveness comes from deterrence. No takedowns would be great news for Adobe if it meant that no one was pirating their software, but it doesn't make for a very compelling presentation at contract renewal time. Ultimately the damage here is relatively minor, but this behaviour could cause serious harm in future.
- laurent123456 6y ago
  I always wondered how it could be legal to automatically send DMCA takedown requests. A DMCA request on a site like Twitter means the post and account are immediately blocked until the situation is clarified, and that can be a big issue for the user, especially if their livelihood depends on access to this account (I guess a bigger problem if their Google account is blocked due to a DMCA on YouTube). Yet it seems ok to automate this, knowing full well that there will be false positives that could seriously affect people. Sometimes it feels like we eventually got a soft version of Skynet, ruled by robots, except they aren't trying to kill us yet.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    I believe that many major sites (e.g. Youtube) offer "DMCA-like" service where copyright holders send takedown requests that are not DMCA requests with all the associated requirements and legal consequences for the one who submits false claims. They don't have to honor DMCA-like-but-not-really requests, but they have chosen to do so.
  - cies 6y ago
    The DMCA is against free expression. To ban some expression a court order used to be needed. Now a DMCA request is enough, as long as some party enabling the expression (Twitter in your example) is legally in the US, to effectively ban the expression. The burden of proof is shifted to the expressor. This makes banning expression so much easier. Funny enough the US tax money also paid for research to circumvent this issue, resulting in what we know as the dark web. > except they aren't trying to kill us yet. A lot of people have had their livelihood taken, or greatly reduced, by DMCA.
    - mavhc 6y ago
      Counter notice, wait 14 days, content goes back up. Not exactly banned, just delayed
      - jjoonathan 6y ago
        In a highly competitive attention economy under merciless algorithmic control, a 14 day delay is a ban in all but name.
- chmod775 6y ago
  It's worse than that. These people (as will many lawyers, outsourced or not) will go out of their way to ruin the image of your company and brand in the eyes of customers, even when there is absolutely nothing to be gained. It just doesn't look great when a devoted fanbase starts getting takedown notices and legal threats over memes, supplementary content, etc. A legal department with agency is not a good idea. There should be very specific instructions as to what they can initiate on their own.
  - shiftpgdn 6y ago
    Adobe holds a near monopoly in the creative world. Everyone /already/ hates them.
    - CharlesW 6y ago
      > Adobe holds a near monopoly in the creative world. I remember that being a real problem, but as I learned when I left the Adobe ecosystem last year, there's now a healthy ecosystem of competitive creative tools from ISVs like Affinity, Gravit, Figma, Procreate, Blackmagic Design, etc. The irony is that Adobe helped jump-start this ecosystem when they went subscription-only.
    - idrios 6y ago
      They have really excellent products, blocked behind subscription fees and extremely high product costs. The open source world is doing a really good job of creating free versions of the things that made their products great.
- hellbannedguy 6y ago
  It just makes Adobe look more greedy though. Adobe should do their own DCMA take down notices, and put some brains behind it? Getting customers used to using you software, just might make them cough up a monthly subscription rip-off at some point? There was a time when you bought the program, and got a reasonable amount of updates. (Sorry about the last line. I know you guys know that.) Adobe lost my wallet when they got greedy, and figured loyal customers wouldn’t take notice. (Yes—I know about their student discounts.)
gfaure 6y ago
That installer brings back memories. When I was a kid, I would wonder how it managed to render its own UI and look so different from all the other DOS executables.
- 5- 6y ago
  i had the same sentiment about partitionmagic, which managed to draw a very convincing windows 95 gui lookalike running under dos: https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c2a66b5e-6e28-3811-c3a7-c29d25525400 https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c2a66b5e-6e28-3811-c3a7-c2...
rerx 6y ago
This one is quite fascinating. It comes with a highres GUI mimicking Windows 3.1. I wonder how big the market was in 1993 for graphical applications running on pure DOS. Screenshots: https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/106ec2b0-c389-1cc3-8411-c3a4e284a2ef https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/106ec2b0-c389-1cc3-8411-c3...
- rob74 6y ago
  For Acrobat Reader, it definitely did make sense - they wanted to make the PDF format usable on as many platforms as possible. I can remember buying a "budget" version of System Shock in the mid-90s which only consisted of a CD in a jewel case, but contained the original manual as a PDF, with the DOS Acrobat Reader included to display it...
  - rerx 6y ago
    That's awesome. I missed that stretch of years when DOS games were sold with PDF manuals stored on disk, but not everybody was launching them from Windows 95... My pre-teen self didn't get to run games from CD-ROM before 1997 or so. :-(
  - swiley 6y ago
    I remember having acrobat on my palm pilot. Man was that awful.
- mkl 6y ago
  It was a pretty big market. There were word processors, spreadsheets, drawing programs, music editors, etc. Not (most?) IDEs though; their GUIs tended to be in text mode. There was even at least one pre-emptive multitasking system for running multiple applications at the same time (full screen) and switching between them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview Running one graphical app under DOS needed less system resources than running one under Windows, so you could get more bang for buck. Also, at that point Windows was still not great at interacting with some hardware devices in real time, so some devices needed DOS to work well.
- anthk 6y ago
dumpsterdiver 6y ago
Well, I suppose they do have the rights. Despite the one abomination that Adobe has birthed (Flash), I'm actually still a big fan, and subscriber. Adobe After Effects is impressive. I pirated it as a kid, and I proudly pay for it now :)
- karpour 6y ago
  As a perpetual license holder that got royally effed over by Adobe, I can proudly say Adobe will never see any money from me anymore. For almost everything Adobe makes, there are other applications that are equally capable or sometimes miles ahead. Photoshop for example seems to be stuck in the 2000s, everything about it is dated, it's slow (due to a massive code base with a lot of legacy baggage) and missing many features artists can take for granted in modern graphics applications. They add fancy AI-powered features all the time while completely ignoring the basic productivity features which wouldn't even be hard to implement.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    What is the equally capable or miles ahead version of Photoshop?
    - sumnole 6y ago
      Affinity by Serif makes good replacement Adobe products
- adimitrov 6y ago
  Adobe did not birth Flash, they bought it, through Macromedia. Also, Flash gets a lot of flak, but it saved us from applets and ActiveX. It also enabled multi media content on a web that was not yet as standardised and functional as today's. Acrobat reader on the other hand, is pure cancer, and has seen many security holes. PDF is useful, but there are far better PDF readers.
  - dumpsterdiver 6y ago
rock_artist 6y ago
I know many services that designed to remove pirated copies and do all the takedown on your behalf. This sounds like one of those. Companies might have multiple such services. What's indeed odd is the takedown is on the referral.
Tepix 6y ago
"This [software] is antique. It belongs in a museum, not in a DMCA claim," Hyppönen tells TorrentFreak. "The original tweets stays up. It’s just a link to a site hosted by someone else. If needed, I’ll fight Adobe." Why does he think he stands a chance? It's not like he linked to a library.
- zeckalpha 6y ago
  He posted a link, not the content itself.
  - rvnx 6y ago
    This makes no difference with any other piracy website
southerntofu 6y ago
This is a very good example of why so-called "intellectual property" (and "private property" as a sacred right) needs to be abolished entirely. It's just a tool of social control that prevents people from sharing/studying things, and makes people die from diseases that we know how to cure (pharmaceutical patents).
- mkl 6y ago
  Without copyright, most software probably wouldn't be written, most books wouldn't be written, most movies wouldn't be made, most music wouldn't be made, etc. I think the copyright term lengths are currently insanely long, so I can see good arguments for shortening them considerably, but I think abolishing copyright entirely would do far more harm than good. Software patents on the other hand could probably be abolished without much ill effect (as they already don't exist in most of the world).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    IP is a product of the 20th century United States. Books were written before that, music was composed before that, paintings were painted before that. There's also this software type called Free (Libre) Software.
    - mkl 6y ago
      Copyright existed before that, and copying was way harder. Now we have instant perfect digital copies. Free software is great, but most software is not Free, and most companies/organisations that use Free software don't contribute to its development.
      - southerntofu 6y ago
        > most companies/organisations that use Free software don't contribute to its development That is a big problem. But the underlying issue is competition (a pillar of the capitalist system) and we should address that instead of trying to fix surface symptoms. If there were incentives to cooperate for the interest of humanity instead of competing for private profit, there would not be a problem.
peterburkimsher 6y ago
Antique software is often preserved better on pirate websites than through official channels. Earlier this week I was setting up an iPod Touch 2G for a friend, maximum iOS 4.2.1, made in 2008. I wanted to install Springtomize, a paid tweak. The Cydia store has shut down, so there's no way to legally buy it. The pirate sites were no longer hosting such an old version. In the end I emailed the developer, and he was super excited and encouraged that someone is still using his code! He sent me the deb file for free, which installed perfectly of course. He's now working for Apple as a security researcher. I'm glad that the Internet Archive tries hard to allow people to upload antique data, and endures the DMCA troubles that come with that. Hopefully WinWorldPC will prevail against Adobe in this case too; and I wonder whether the EFF can help.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  > 'quote redacted'... This is enough info to get him in trouble with his employer. (Apple is very strict about Apple-related side-hustles, especially the ones not through the 'proper' channels like jailbroken devices). Might be worth rewording this.
  - peterburkimsher 6y ago
    Edited to say that he sent it to me for free.
- anthk 6y ago
  Install Rockbox on it.
  - peterburkimsher 6y ago
    Rockbox and iPodLinux are great for hard drive based iPods with a click wheel. The iPod Touch is a touchscreen media player, like an iPhone without a phone.
option_greek 6y ago
We need to have a DMCA day every year where everyone sends a 100 notices each to take down random content and preferably targeting content of politicians. Its the only way to raise awareness and also make companies not blindly remove content. If costs become high, they will lobby for more restrictive use of these notices.
- haskal 6y ago
  Those are hundreds of instances of people committing perjury.
  - thanksforfish 6y ago
    That may be the point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      I don't believe actively sending false claims of copyright infringement can be called 'civil' still. It's going for the offense, instead of passively resisting.
      - mrguyorama 6y ago
        The entire point of civil disobedience is to commit a crime (and usually do the time) in order to raise awareness about the unjustness of said crime
  - curryst 6y ago
    Not necessarily. The Constitution requires that all people get equal enforcement of the law. If you can demonstrate that the perjury components are never enforced against companies, you can argue that perjury charges would be unconstitutional selective enforcement. I wouldn't want to be one of the people who have to prove that, though.
forinti 6y ago
I think software that is no longer supported should go into the public domain. If I can't buy it or get support, then I shouldn't have to worry about copying it. Actually, this should be valid for everything.
- brailsafe 6y ago
  I'm running Omnifocus 2 on my mac, and it's been broken partially since Big Sur. Omnigroup doesn't support it, won't release a patch, and sells Omnifocus 3 as a separate product. I'd love to be able to just fix this small error and continue using the thing I bought.
- coldpie 6y ago
  How do you define "no longer supported"? Easiest answer is to restore copyright length to a sane amount of time. Prior to 1978, it was 28 years, optionally extendable to another 28 years. Our current conception of effectively-infinite copyright is very new, and I think has had incredibly harmful effects. https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2020/shrinking/ https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2020/shrinking...
  - Mandatum 6y ago
    Yeah we end standard support release+2 years and extended support release+5 years for major versions. Given that it's still mostly the same core code that was implemented 10 years ago, not sure how this would gel.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  But the brand name is still protected; the last version of a product named Adobe Acrobat Reader is from last year. The PDF standard is open, and there are plenty of reader alternatives with all kinds of licenses; if Acrobat was some kind of unique thing that was no longer supported or you could no longer get a legal copy, then you'd have more of a point.
  - cestith 6y ago

> Looking more closely at the takedown notice, we see that it was sent by the “brand protection analyst” at Incopro, which is one of Adobe’s anti-piracy partners There's a whole secondary and very interesting story to be told here about the nasty relationship that has formed between copyright holders and these firms specializing in takedowns that cling to them like barnacles on a whale. It's obviously tempting to outsource a job like tracking down copyright violations which doesn't play in to any of your business's competencies, but it also seems quite likely that the companies who provide this "service" typically do so in a way that looks good on a paper report that a manager at the host company receives, but doesn't actually benefit them optimally for the money they spend on it. Takedown companies seem to go after violations that will net them the fastest and most reliable takedown rates. They want to run up the score so that they can say "last month, we took down 5482 violations of your copyright in Adobe Reader" or what have you. This means, largely, going after posts and uploads on sites that have "quick service" DMCA takedowns like Twitter and YouTube. You're not investing time on random websites that may or may not even respond. No human intelligence is required (indeed, even desirable) in this process. It's effectively humans being paid the lowest possible wage to do an automated job. In some cases I suppose it's probably fully automated.

optimiz3 6y ago
Diffusion of responsibility; the takedown firm takes a lot of the bad PR and legal liability when wrong. Adobe also shields their brand by not insourcing.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  The wording of this headline disagrees. And Adobe can try to shift the blame however they want, the final responsibility lies with them as the rights owner and as the ones who hired that takedown firm to act in their name.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
I think you're right - just looks like monthly report padding. This is the problem with private security, it's hard to trust that the client sees the value in you, when part of your effectiveness comes from deterrence. No takedowns would be great news for Adobe if it meant that no one was pirating their software, but it doesn't make for a very compelling presentation at contract renewal time. Ultimately the damage here is relatively minor, but this behaviour could cause serious harm in future.
laurent123456 6y ago
I always wondered how it could be legal to automatically send DMCA takedown requests. A DMCA request on a site like Twitter means the post and account are immediately blocked until the situation is clarified, and that can be a big issue for the user, especially if their livelihood depends on access to this account (I guess a bigger problem if their Google account is blocked due to a DMCA on YouTube). Yet it seems ok to automate this, knowing full well that there will be false positives that could seriously affect people. Sometimes it feels like we eventually got a soft version of Skynet, ruled by robots, except they aren't trying to kill us yet.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  I believe that many major sites (e.g. Youtube) offer "DMCA-like" service where copyright holders send takedown requests that are not DMCA requests with all the associated requirements and legal consequences for the one who submits false claims. They don't have to honor DMCA-like-but-not-really requests, but they have chosen to do so.
- cies 6y ago
  The DMCA is against free expression. To ban some expression a court order used to be needed. Now a DMCA request is enough, as long as some party enabling the expression (Twitter in your example) is legally in the US, to effectively ban the expression. The burden of proof is shifted to the expressor. This makes banning expression so much easier. Funny enough the US tax money also paid for research to circumvent this issue, resulting in what we know as the dark web. > except they aren't trying to kill us yet. A lot of people have had their livelihood taken, or greatly reduced, by DMCA.
  - mavhc 6y ago
    Counter notice, wait 14 days, content goes back up. Not exactly banned, just delayed
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      In a highly competitive attention economy under merciless algorithmic control, a 14 day delay is a ban in all but name.
chmod775 6y ago
It's worse than that. These people (as will many lawyers, outsourced or not) will go out of their way to ruin the image of your company and brand in the eyes of customers, even when there is absolutely nothing to be gained. It just doesn't look great when a devoted fanbase starts getting takedown notices and legal threats over memes, supplementary content, etc. A legal department with agency is not a good idea. There should be very specific instructions as to what they can initiate on their own.
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  Adobe holds a near monopoly in the creative world. Everyone /already/ hates them.
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > Adobe holds a near monopoly in the creative world. I remember that being a real problem, but as I learned when I left the Adobe ecosystem last year, there's now a healthy ecosystem of competitive creative tools from ISVs like Affinity, Gravit, Figma, Procreate, Blackmagic Design, etc. The irony is that Adobe helped jump-start this ecosystem when they went subscription-only.
  - idrios 6y ago
    They have really excellent products, blocked behind subscription fees and extremely high product costs. The open source world is doing a really good job of creating free versions of the things that made their products great.
hellbannedguy 6y ago
It just makes Adobe look more greedy though. Adobe should do their own DCMA take down notices, and put some brains behind it? Getting customers used to using you software, just might make them cough up a monthly subscription rip-off at some point? There was a time when you bought the program, and got a reasonable amount of updates. (Sorry about the last line. I know you guys know that.) Adobe lost my wallet when they got greedy, and figured loyal customers wouldn’t take notice. (Yes—I know about their student discounts.)

gfaure 6y ago

That installer brings back memories. When I was a kid, I would wonder how it managed to render its own UI and look so different from all the other DOS executables.

5- 6y ago
i had the same sentiment about partitionmagic, which managed to draw a very convincing windows 95 gui lookalike running under dos: https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c2a66b5e-6e28-3811-c3a7-c29d25525400 https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c2a66b5e-6e28-3811-c3a7-c2...

rerx 6y ago

This one is quite fascinating. It comes with a highres GUI mimicking Windows 3.1. I wonder how big the market was in 1993 for graphical applications running on pure DOS. Screenshots: https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/106ec2b0-c389-1cc3-8411-c3a4e284a2ef https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/106ec2b0-c389-1cc3-8411-c3...

rob74 6y ago
For Acrobat Reader, it definitely did make sense - they wanted to make the PDF format usable on as many platforms as possible. I can remember buying a "budget" version of System Shock in the mid-90s which only consisted of a CD in a jewel case, but contained the original manual as a PDF, with the DOS Acrobat Reader included to display it...
- rerx 6y ago
  That's awesome. I missed that stretch of years when DOS games were sold with PDF manuals stored on disk, but not everybody was launching them from Windows 95... My pre-teen self didn't get to run games from CD-ROM before 1997 or so. :-(
- swiley 6y ago
  I remember having acrobat on my palm pilot. Man was that awful.
mkl 6y ago
It was a pretty big market. There were word processors, spreadsheets, drawing programs, music editors, etc. Not (most?) IDEs though; their GUIs tended to be in text mode. There was even at least one pre-emptive multitasking system for running multiple applications at the same time (full screen) and switching between them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview Running one graphical app under DOS needed less system resources than running one under Windows, so you could get more bang for buck. Also, at that point Windows was still not great at interacting with some hardware devices in real time, so some devices needed DOS to work well.
anthk 6y ago

dumpsterdiver 6y ago

Well, I suppose they do have the rights. Despite the one abomination that Adobe has birthed (Flash), I'm actually still a big fan, and subscriber. Adobe After Effects is impressive. I pirated it as a kid, and I proudly pay for it now :)

karpour 6y ago
As a perpetual license holder that got royally effed over by Adobe, I can proudly say Adobe will never see any money from me anymore. For almost everything Adobe makes, there are other applications that are equally capable or sometimes miles ahead. Photoshop for example seems to be stuck in the 2000s, everything about it is dated, it's slow (due to a massive code base with a lot of legacy baggage) and missing many features artists can take for granted in modern graphics applications. They add fancy AI-powered features all the time while completely ignoring the basic productivity features which wouldn't even be hard to implement.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  What is the equally capable or miles ahead version of Photoshop?
  - sumnole 6y ago
    Affinity by Serif makes good replacement Adobe products
adimitrov 6y ago
Adobe did not birth Flash, they bought it, through Macromedia. Also, Flash gets a lot of flak, but it saved us from applets and ActiveX. It also enabled multi media content on a web that was not yet as standardised and functional as today's. Acrobat reader on the other hand, is pure cancer, and has seen many security holes. PDF is useful, but there are far better PDF readers.
- dumpsterdiver 6y ago

rock_artist 6y ago

I know many services that designed to remove pirated copies and do all the takedown on your behalf. This sounds like one of those. Companies might have multiple such services. What's indeed odd is the takedown is on the referral.

Tepix 6y ago

"This [software] is antique. It belongs in a museum, not in a DMCA claim," Hyppönen tells TorrentFreak. "The original tweets stays up. It’s just a link to a site hosted by someone else. If needed, I’ll fight Adobe." Why does he think he stands a chance? It's not like he linked to a library.

zeckalpha 6y ago
He posted a link, not the content itself.
- rvnx 6y ago
  This makes no difference with any other piracy website

southerntofu 6y ago

This is a very good example of why so-called "intellectual property" (and "private property" as a sacred right) needs to be abolished entirely. It's just a tool of social control that prevents people from sharing/studying things, and makes people die from diseases that we know how to cure (pharmaceutical patents).

mkl 6y ago
Without copyright, most software probably wouldn't be written, most books wouldn't be written, most movies wouldn't be made, most music wouldn't be made, etc. I think the copyright term lengths are currently insanely long, so I can see good arguments for shortening them considerably, but I think abolishing copyright entirely would do far more harm than good. Software patents on the other hand could probably be abolished without much ill effect (as they already don't exist in most of the world).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pmlnr 6y ago
  IP is a product of the 20th century United States. Books were written before that, music was composed before that, paintings were painted before that. There's also this software type called Free (Libre) Software.
  - mkl 6y ago
    Copyright existed before that, and copying was way harder. Now we have instant perfect digital copies. Free software is great, but most software is not Free, and most companies/organisations that use Free software don't contribute to its development.
    - southerntofu 6y ago
      > most companies/organisations that use Free software don't contribute to its development That is a big problem. But the underlying issue is competition (a pillar of the capitalist system) and we should address that instead of trying to fix surface symptoms. If there were incentives to cooperate for the interest of humanity instead of competing for private profit, there would not be a problem.

peterburkimsher 6y ago

Antique software is often preserved better on pirate websites than through official channels. Earlier this week I was setting up an iPod Touch 2G for a friend, maximum iOS 4.2.1, made in 2008. I wanted to install Springtomize, a paid tweak. The Cydia store has shut down, so there's no way to legally buy it. The pirate sites were no longer hosting such an old version. In the end I emailed the developer, and he was super excited and encouraged that someone is still using his code! He sent me the deb file for free, which installed perfectly of course. He's now working for Apple as a security researcher. I'm glad that the Internet Archive tries hard to allow people to upload antique data, and endures the DMCA troubles that come with that. Hopefully WinWorldPC will prevail against Adobe in this case too; and I wonder whether the EFF can help.

londons_explore 6y ago
> 'quote redacted'... This is enough info to get him in trouble with his employer. (Apple is very strict about Apple-related side-hustles, especially the ones not through the 'proper' channels like jailbroken devices). Might be worth rewording this.
- peterburkimsher 6y ago
  Edited to say that he sent it to me for free.
anthk 6y ago
Install Rockbox on it.
- peterburkimsher 6y ago
  Rockbox and iPodLinux are great for hard drive based iPods with a click wheel. The iPod Touch is a touchscreen media player, like an iPhone without a phone.

option_greek 6y ago

We need to have a DMCA day every year where everyone sends a 100 notices each to take down random content and preferably targeting content of politicians. Its the only way to raise awareness and also make companies not blindly remove content. If costs become high, they will lobby for more restrictive use of these notices.

haskal 6y ago
Those are hundreds of instances of people committing perjury.
- thanksforfish 6y ago
  That may be the point https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    I don't believe actively sending false claims of copyright infringement can be called 'civil' still. It's going for the offense, instead of passively resisting.
    - mrguyorama 6y ago
      The entire point of civil disobedience is to commit a crime (and usually do the time) in order to raise awareness about the unjustness of said crime
- curryst 6y ago
  Not necessarily. The Constitution requires that all people get equal enforcement of the law. If you can demonstrate that the perjury components are never enforced against companies, you can argue that perjury charges would be unconstitutional selective enforcement. I wouldn't want to be one of the people who have to prove that, though.

forinti 6y ago

I think software that is no longer supported should go into the public domain. If I can't buy it or get support, then I shouldn't have to worry about copying it. Actually, this should be valid for everything.

brailsafe 6y ago
I'm running Omnifocus 2 on my mac, and it's been broken partially since Big Sur. Omnigroup doesn't support it, won't release a patch, and sells Omnifocus 3 as a separate product. I'd love to be able to just fix this small error and continue using the thing I bought.
coldpie 6y ago
How do you define "no longer supported"? Easiest answer is to restore copyright length to a sane amount of time. Prior to 1978, it was 28 years, optionally extendable to another 28 years. Our current conception of effectively-infinite copyright is very new, and I think has had incredibly harmful effects. https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2020/shrinking/ https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2020/shrinking...
- Mandatum 6y ago
  Yeah we end standard support release+2 years and extended support release+5 years for major versions. Given that it's still mostly the same core code that was implemented 10 years ago, not sure how this would gel.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
But the brand name is still protected; the last version of a product named Adobe Acrobat Reader is from last year. The PDF standard is open, and there are plenty of reader alternatives with all kinds of licenses; if Acrobat was some kind of unique thing that was no longer supported or you could no longer get a legal copy, then you'd have more of a point.
- cestith 6y ago